news you won't find in the mainstream media

Why the War Party Loves the Export-Import Bank

The other day Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Boeing) was railing against "unilateral disarmament" and declaring "I haven’t heard that kind of talk since the days of George McGovern," or words to that effect. Was he talking about our nuclear policy, or perhaps the revived war in Iraq?

Nope. He was on the John Stossel show defending the Export-Import Bank, and his attack on "McGovernism" was in reference to efforts aiming at its abolition.

The Ex-Im Bank’s alleged mission is to promote foreign trade: it does so primarily by loaning money directly to foreign governments (or foreign-owned companies) to enable them to buy American products, and by insuring – guaranteeing – loans. Established by Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order in 1934 specifically to subsidize trade with the Soviet Union, and later Cuba, in both cases the administration sought to use financial leverage to advance its foreign policy goals: lending support to the Soviet Union and the Cuban dictatorship of Juan Batista.

Over the years the agency expanded – like all government programs – and eventually became what amounts to a massive slush fund for the politically connected corporate elite. Among its biggest "customers" are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Halliburton – all, not coincidentally, charter members of what Dwight Eisenhower deemed the "military-industrial complex."

I point out this confluence because until recently the Ex-Im Bank was a major fulcrum for arms deals involving US allies unable to afford the expensive arms purchases involved in fulfilling their duties as instruments of US foreign policy. And in the face of a libertarian offensive in Congress against Ex-Im’s reauthorization, the War Party is coming out in favor of not only keeping but expanding it to revive its former role as a clearinghouse for arms deals and loans to foreign despots.

In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of "free market" thinking, defense analyst Tom Donnelly – formerly chief of strategic communications at Lockheed and a big honcho over at Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century – starts out his pitch for keeping Ex-Im with a telling phrase: "Corporate welfare in the defense of liberty is no vice." Mourning the defeat of House GOP majority leader Eric Cantor – one of the Bank’s biggest shills – and bemoaning the stated intent of the new Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy to oppose reauthorization, he writes:

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Obama’s Doctrine of Destruction of America as we know it & the March to a New World Order

We could not have a better person in office than President Obama, if you want someone to do everything he can to destroy the country that is. This President has gone out of his way to make sure not only just a few of his Socialist policies ruin us, but that his whole time in office is dedicated to the destruction of the United States as we know it.

We now have the dirtiest most corrupt President ever to hold office, making Richard M. Nixon look like the most honest President we ever had, when comparing the two. At least Nixon loved America; Obama hates the very core of American values of which make us great.

President Obama said over the weekend that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which seeks to create a caliphate out of the Sunni lands of Syria and Iraq it occupies, poses a threat to the United States.

Obama has thus committed 300 special forces to assist Iraq’s defeated and demoralized army, and there is talk of U.S. air and missile strikes and drone attacks on ISIS, in Syria as well as in Iraq.

That would constitute a new war. Yet the president, who taught constitutional law, says he does not need Congressional authorization.

Obama is about to make a decision fateful for himself and for his country. Does he not realize that he is on the edge of an abyss, about to stumble into a tribal and religious war across the Middle East?

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The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really an Attack on Iran

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where he says that Maliki’s military forces in Mosul “melted away”. Interestingly, the Haass op-ed was followed by a piece by David Gardener who used almost the very same language. He said the “army melts away.” So, I decided to thumb through the news a bit and see how many other journalists were stung by the “melted away” bug. And, as it happens, there were quite a few, including Politico, NBC News, News Sentinel, Global Post, the National Interest, ABC News etc. Now, the only way an unusual expression like that would pop up with such frequency would be if the authors were getting their talking points from a central authority. (which they probably do.) But the effect, of course, is the exact opposite than what the authors intend, that is, these cookie cutter stories leave readers scratching their heads and feeling like something fishy is going on.

And something fishy IS going on. The whole fable about 1,500 jihadis scaring the pants off 30,000 Iraqi security guards to the point where they threw away their rifles, changed their clothes and headed for the hills, is just not believable. I don’t know what happened in Mosul, but, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t that. That story just doesn’t pass the smell test.

And what happened in Mosul matters too, because nearly every journalist and pundit in the MSM is using the story to discredit Maliki and suggest that maybe Iraq would be better off without him. Haass says that it shows that the army’s “allegiance to the government is paper thin”. Gardener says its a sign of “a fast failing state.” Other op-ed writers like Nicolas Kristof attack Maliki for other reasons, like being too sectarian. Here’s Kristof:

“The debacle in Iraq isn’t President Obama’s fault. It’s not the Republicans’ fault. Both bear some responsibility, but, overwhelmingly, it’s the fault of the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri Kamal al-Maliki.”

Of course, Kristof is no match for the imperial mouthpiece, Tom Friedman. When it comes to pure boneheaded bluster, Friedman is still numero uno. Here’s how the jowly pundit summed it up in an article in the Sunday Times titled “Five Principles for Iraq”:

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US in Iraq: Geopolitical Arsonists Seek to Burn Region

When a fire is raging, firefighters are called - not the arsonist who started
it, especially if they return to the scene of the crime dragging a barrel of
gasoline behind them. Yet, this is precisely what the US proposes - that they -
the geopolitical arsonists - be allowed to return to Iraq to extinguish the
threat of heavily armed sectarian militants streaming from NATO territory in
Turkey and edging ever closer to Baghdad.

ISIS: Made in USA The
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a creation of the United States and
its Persian Gulf allies, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and recently added to the
list, Kuwait. The Daily Beast in an article titled, "America's Allies Are Funding ISIS," states:

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in
Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the
war on terror.

Despite the candor of the opening sentence, the article would unravel
into a myriad of lies laid to obfuscate America's role in the creation of ISIS.
The article would claim:

The extremist group that is threatening
the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of
elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There,
the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S.
goal of stability and moderation in the region.

However, the US goal in the region was
never "stability" and surely not "moderation." As early as 2007, sources within
the Pentagon and across the US intelligence community revealed a conspiracy to
drown the Middle East in sectarian war, and to do so by arming and funding
extremist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda itself. Published in 2007 - a full 4 years before
the 2011 "Arab Spring" would begin - Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour
Hersh's New Yorker article titled, ""The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our
enemies in the war on terrorism?"
stated specifically (emphasis added):Read the entire article

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The Coming Storm

The defeat of Eric Cantor – GOP House majority leader and a leading light of the party’s neoconservative-corporatist wing – has the pundits in an uproar. They are flummoxed: what could have led to one of the biggest upsets in American political history? After all, a party majority leader hasn’t been defeated – let alone in a primary! – since 1877. And who is this guy, Dave Brat, anyway – who raised around $200,000 total, but only spent half of it, while Cantor – the Chamber of Commerce’s best friend – raised and spent millions?

They settled on a neat little narrative early on: the election was all about immigration, they told us, and Brat is a "Tea Party" politician with "nativist" tendencies. That explanation, however, soon fell apart when it was revealed that the Tea Party groups had done exactly nothing to help Brat: indeed the leader of Tea Party Patriots, one of the biggest national groups, wouldn’t even take his phone calls.

Furthermore, it turned out Brat had campaigned not only or even primarily on the immigration issue – which only came up in the last few days of the campaign – but on what he called "crony capitalism," hitting Cantor over and over again on his subservience to corporate interests. And it wasn’t the typical left-wing egalitarian demagogy that condemns any successful business for not putting "people before profits," as the old Communist Party USA slogan puts it. Brat was steamed that businessmen were going to Washington asking for special favors – subsidies – in order to boost (or maintain) their profit margins, and Cantor was a major cog in their political machine.

As news of Brat’s stunning upset made headlines, Boeing’s stock fell on fears the Export-Import Bank – a major source of federal handouts to the corporate sector – might not be reauthorized. A few liberal commentators, such as Ryan Lizza over at The New Yorker and John Nichols of The Nation, got this much right: but there’s much more to it than that.

A trip to Brat’s modest campaign web site tells a good part of the story. Here he is on the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans:

"Dave believes that the Constitution does not need to be compromised for matters of national security. He supports the end of bulk phone and email data collection by the NSA, IRS, or any other branch of government."

Cantor Loses–By 11 Million Voters. Now They’re Pretending It Wasn’t About Amnesty

Economics professor Dave Brat crushed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary Tuesday night, in a campaign that was mostly about Cantor’s supporting Amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens.This marks the first time a U.S. House majority leader has ever lost a primary election. His crushing defeat reinforces a central point: Whenever the voters know an election is about immigration, they will always vote against more immigration—especially Amnesty.

Cantor spent more than $5 million on his campaign. Brat spent less than $150,000. But Brat made the election about Cantor’s support for Amnesty, so he won.

The pro-Amnesty crowd–i.e., everyone except the American people–promptly lost its collective mind. The Amnesty shills went on the attack, insisting that Cantor’s historic defeat had nothing to do amnesty. Brat’s triumph was touted as simply a victory for the “Tea Party.”

Daniel Estulin: The True Story of The Bilderberg Group - Nuclear War with Russia

The Rules of Revolt

There are some essential lessons we can learn from the student occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which took place 25 years ago. The 1989 protests began as a demonstration by university students to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, the reformist Communist Party chief who had been forced out by Deng Xiaoping. The protests swiftly expanded to include demands for an end to corruption, for press freedom and for democracy. At their height, perhaps a million people were in the square. The protests were crushed on the night of June 3-4 when some 200,000 soldiers, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, attacked. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed demonstrators were killed.

Lesson No. 1. A nonviolent movement that disrupts the machinery of state and speaks a truth a state hopes to suppress has the force to terrify authority and create deep fissures within the power structure. The ruling elites in China, we now know from leaked internal documents and the work of a handful of historians, believed the protests had the potential to dislodge them from power. Monolithic power, as we saw in China, is often a mirage. Some of the internal documents that exposed the fears and deep divisions within the ruling elite have been collected by the Princeton University Library.

Lesson No. 2. An uprising or a revolution usually follows a period of relative prosperity and liberalization. It is ignited not by the poor but by middle-class and elite families’ sons and daughters, often college-educated, whom Mikhail Bakunin called déclassé intellectuals, and who are being denied opportunities to advance socially and economically.

Lesson No. 3. Radical mass movements often begin by appealing respectfully to authority for minimal reforms. The students, gathering in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu, asked that the Chinese constitution, with its guarantees of rule of law and freedom of speech, be respected. Radicalization within the movement happened in the midst of the demonstrations. Once a movement educates itself about structures of power, and once those in state authority display their indifference to the tepid demands of the demonstrators, a movement becomes bolder and wiser. The Tiananmen Square occupation, begun as a spontaneous reaction to a death, swiftly evolved into a revolt. Students eventually drafted what became known as the Seven Demands.

Lesson No. 4. Once déclassé intellectuals make alliances with the working class a regime is in serious danger. The protest by the students resonated throughout China. Thousands of people, many from the working class, held their own demonstrations in cities across the country. Workers in Beijing rallied to the students. The state’s relentless demonization of the protesters, something we saw in the United States in response to actions of the Occupy movement, was aimed primarily at preventing a student/worker alliance. Once the crackdown was complete, many workers who had taken part were executed. Student leaders, who came from families with connections and privilege, were usually given prison sentences.

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What Really Happened in Tiananmen Square 25 Years Ago

Twenty-five years ago today, every U.S. media outlet, along with then President Bush and the U.S. Congress were whipping up a full scale frenzied hysteria and attack against the Chinese government for what was described as the cold-blooded massacre of many thousands of non-violent “pro-democracy” students who had occupied Tiananmen Square for seven weeks.The hysteria generated about the Tiananmen Square “massacre” was based on a fictitious narrative about what actually happened when the Chinese government finally cleared the square of protestors on June 4, 1989.The demonization of China was highly effective. Nearly all sectors of U.S. society, including most of the “left,” accepted the imperialist presentation of what happened.Tank set on fire by protesters outside of Tiananment Square, June 4, 1989At the time the Chinese government’s official account of the events was immediately dismissed out of hand as false propaganda. China reported that about 300 people had died in clashes on June 4 and that many of the dead were soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army. China insisted that there was no massacre of students in Tiananmen Square and in fact the soldiers cleared Tiananmen Square of demonstrators without any shooting.iThe Chinese government also asserted that unarmed soldiers who had entered Tiananmen Square in the two days prior to June 4 were set on fire and lynched with their corpses hung from buses. Other soldiers were incinerated when army vehicles were torched with soldiers unable to evacuate and many others were badly beaten by violent mob attacks.These accounts were true and well documented. It would not be difficult to imagine how violently the Pentagon and U.S. law enforcement agencies would have reacted if the Occupy movement, for instance, had similarly set soldiers and police on fire, taken their weapons and lynched them when the government was attempting to clear them from public spaces.

Obama's Billion Dollar Cold War Begins

Obama Apologizes for Prisoner Swap, Judge Napolitano Says He Should Be Impeached

The AP has reported that the White House has apologized for not giving key lawmakers advance notice of the controversial Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap: Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and Republican respectively on the Senate Select committee on Intelligence, said White House officials called them Monday to say the lack of notification had been an oversight. Feinstein said she received a call from Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken. The White House damage control comes as Republican lawmakers accused the White House of putting U.S. service men and women at risk by releasing the five top Taliban members being held in Guantanamo in exchange for Bergdahl. An oversight? How is that possible, when Obama himself signed the 30 day advance notice into law last year? The administration is required to give Congress 30 days advance notice of any plans to release a prisoner from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, per section 1033 of the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act — signed into law by Obama in 2013. Oh, that’s right – King Obama can do whatever he damn well pleases. Remember, back in February he told French President Francois Hollande so on their Monticello visit: Read the entire article

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Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl: Prisoner of the War Party

Is US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl a traitor or a martyr, a coward who walked away from his unit or a symbol of how a misconceived war used US soldiers as pawns in a losing geo-political game?

This is going to be the issue as the prisoner swap with the Taliban takes incoming fire from Republicans like John McCain and others opposed to "negotiating with terrorists." Yet the real issue goes deeper than that: Bergdahl was profoundly disillusioned by the war, and his capture by the Taliban would never had occurred if he hadn’t walked off base – in plain language, deserted, as this 2012 Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings makes clear. In his last email to his parents, sent just before he walked, Bergdahl wrote:

“The future is too good to waste on lies. And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”

Bergdahl goes on at length, indicting a military system that punished competent soldiers and rewarded the "conceited brown-nose shitbag" who’s "allowed to do whatever [he] wants." In spite of his pro-military outlook, which had prompted him to join up in the first place, he realized he had joined "the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies." Bergdahl was no anti-military hippie: he’d long wanted to be a soldier and even tried to join the French Foreign Legion before enlisting in the US Army. A 23-year-old idealist who took soldiering seriously, Bergdahl was shocked to learn that the best officers "are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same."

It wasn’t just a military machine run from afar by incompetents that riled him, it was also the nature of the mission itself:

"In the second-to-last paragraph of the e-mail, Bowe wrote about his broader disgust with America’s approach to the war – an effort, on the ground, that seemed to represent the exact opposite of the kind of concerted campaign to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of average Afghans envisioned by counterinsurgency strategists. ‘I am sorry for everything here,’ Bowe told his parents. ‘These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.’ He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative, possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP. ‘We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.’"